Saharan Frontiers , livre ebook

SAHARAN FRONTIERS
Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa
Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg EDITORS
SAHARAN FRONTIERS
Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa
EDITED BY James McDougall and Judith Scheele
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Saharan frontiers : space and mobility in Northwest Africa / edited by James McDougall and Judith Scheele.
p. cm. - (Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00124-5 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00126-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00131-3 (e-book) 1. Africans-Sahara-Migrations. 2. Sahara-Emigration and immigration. 3. Trade routes-Sahara. 4. Sahara-Ethnic relations. 5. Africa, North-Relations-Africa, West. 6. Africa, West-Relations-Africa, North.
I. McDougall, James, [date] II. Scheele, Judith, [date]
DT333.S27 2012
304.8 20966-dc23 2011049611
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Spelling and Transliteration
Introduction
Time and Space in the Sahara
JUDITH SCHEELE AND JAMES MCDOUGALL
PART 1. FRAMING SAHARAN AFRICA
1. Situations Both Alike?
Connectivity, the Mediterranean, the Sahara
PEREGRINE HORDEN
2. On Being Saharan
E. ANN MCDOUGALL
3. Saharan Trade in Classical Antiquity
KATIA SCH RLE
4. Frontiers, Borderlands, and Saharan/World History
JAMES MCDOUGALL
PART 2. ENVIRONMENT, TERRITORY, AND COMMUNITY
5. The Rites of Baba Merzug
Diaspora, Ibadism, and Social Status in the Valley of the Mzab
FATMA OUSSEDIK
6. Celebrating Mawlid in Timimoun
Ritual as Words in Motion, Space as Time Stood Still
ABDERRAHMANE MOUSSAOUI
7. Villages and Crossroads
Changing Territorialities among the Tuareg of Northern Mali
CHARLES GR MONT
8. Ethnicity and Interdependence
Moors and Haalpulaaren in the Senegal Valley
OLIVIER LESERVOISIER
PART 3. STRANGERS, SPACE, AND LABOR
9. Mauritania and the New Frontier of Europe
From Transit to Residence
ARMELLE CHOPLIN
10. Living Together and Living Apart in Nouakchott
LAURENCE MARFAING
11. Cultural Interaction and the Artisanal Economy in Tamanrasset
DIDA BADI
PART 4. ECONOMIES OF MOVEMENT
12. Notes on the Informal Economy in Southern Morocco
MOHAMED OUDADA
13. Garage or Caravanserail
Saharan Connectivity in Al-Khal l, Northern Mali
JUDITH SCHEELE
14. Movements of People and Goods
Local Impacts and Dynamics of Migration to and through the Central Sahara
JULIEN BRACHET
Glossary
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book developed from a series of conversations between the editors over several years, arising from a convergence of interests between our separate projects on the history and anthropology of northwest Africa, and more particularly from a three-day, international, multidisciplinary conference, Navigating Northwest Africa: Towards an Analysis of Saharan Connectivity?, which was held at Magdalen College, Oxford, in September 2008. Most of the chapters in this volume originated as papers presented at that conference. The meeting was generously sponsored by a number of institutions without whose support this project would not have been possible, and we are very happy to be able to record our thanks to them: Magdalen College, Oxford; the International Migration Institute at the James Martin 21st Century School, University of Oxford; the Middle East Centre, St. Antony s College, Oxford; the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; the Oxford Research Network on Government in Africa; the Khalid Abdallah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford; the African Studies Association (UK); the Moroccan-British Society; and the Maison Fran aise, Oxford.
We are grateful to Hein de Haas, Clive Holes, Michael Willis, and Benedetta Rossi, who as panel chairs and discussants not only facilitated discussion of the papers but also provided invaluable comments from their different areas of expertise. Our students at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Oxford (especially those in James McDougall s undergraduate class The Saharan World: Society, Culture, and Politics in Northwest Africa at SOAS in 2008-2009, and in our jointly taught graduate seminar History and Anthropology in the Sahara at Oxford in 2010-2011) have been thoughtful and constructive (if unwitting) audiences on whom many of the ideas in this book have been tried out.
Bringing the volume to completion has taken-of course-rather longer than we originally anticipated, and we would like to thank all the contributors for their patience as well as for their timeliness in responding to our queries and requests. Katia Sch rle, Charles Gr mont, Armelle Choplin, and most especially Julien Brachet deserve additional and heartfelt thanks for providing expertly drawn maps in unreasonably quick time. Apart from chapters 1-4 and 13 , all of the contributions to this book were originally written in French, and were translated by the editors. Each chapter was subsequently revised by both editors in collaboration with each author. While the ideas and arguments of these chapters, as well as the original research on which they are based, are therefore entirely the property of their authors, any infelicities or errors in their expression are the responsibility of the editors.
NOTE ON SPELLING AND TRANSLITERATION
For the sake of clarity, words in Berber, Arabic, or other West African languages have been transliterated according to the simplest available method in each case. For Arabic, we have adopted a simplified transliteration showing long vowels with a macron ( awl d ) and indicating the ayn ( shar a ), but we have not used diacritics to indicate emphatic consonants. Hamza is indicated when it occurs mid-word ( q id ), in a phrase ( bi smi-ll h ), or at the end of a plural form ( shuraf ). Place names and proper names are given in the most familiar form in use in the region, elsewhere in the English-language literature, and on the most widely available maps (especially Michelin map 741, Africa North and West ). We depart from widespread conventions only in a few cases for precision of transliteration, e.g., qsar instead of ksar, qs r instead of ksur/ksour, shaykh instead of sheikh/cheikh.
SAHARAN FRONTIERS
INTRODUCTION
Time and Space in the Sahara
Judith Scheele and James McDougall

And much I mus d on legends quaint and old Which whilome won the hearts of all on Earth Toward their brightness, ev n as flame draws air; But had their being in the heart of Man As air in th life of flame: and thou wert then A centr d glory-circled Memory, Divinest Atlantis, whom the waves Have buried deep, and thou of later name Imperial Eldorado roof d with gold: Shadows to which, despite all shocks of Change, All on-set of capricious Accident, Men clung with yearning Hope which would not die.
-T ENNYSON , T IMBUCTOO (1829)
In the early nineteenth century, when the young Tennyson submitted his poem Timbuctoo to a poetry competition launched by the chancellor of Cambridge University, attempts to reach the fabled city of gold in the heart of the Sahara had become a vivid expression of the rivalry between France and England, the two great nations that were then vying for commercial supremacy on the African continent (Heffernan 2001; Davoine 2003). The topic chosen by the chancellor clearly reflected political concerns and patriotic enthusiasm as well as a longstanding fascination with the Sahara. Tennyson had first composed the poem with the title Armageddon, but found he hardly had to change its content once the title was amended. And indeed, from a European point of view in the Romantic age, the hill of Megiddo and the city of Timbuktu stood for much the same thing: they both mattered not so much for what they were, but for how they were imagined, as sites of timeless truth, objects of longing for deep antiquity and of melancholic reflection on its decadence. Even in the more ordinarily hardheaded calculations of European imperial policy, the Sahara was largely left to poetic license. Until the discovery of oil in the mid-1950s, the region figured more as a status symbol than as a physical region of human habitation, or-once the long-standing perception of northwest Africa s interior as a commercial El Dorado awaiting capture proved wholly mythical-even as an economic stake in the scramble for Africa. 1 For the French army, the vast and open spaces of the Sahara, conquered and unified under military rule, were a stage for the display of grandio